April 13, 2006
Charles Johnson to headline UW Libraries’ “Literary Voices” fundraiser
National Book Award Winner Charles Johnson will deliver the keynote speech at the Friends of the UW Libraries’ first “Literary Voices,” a dinner where guests dine at tables with authors, one of the events of Washington Weekend, April 27-29, on campus.
The event will be at 6 p.m. Saturday, April 29, at the UW Club. Other authors scheduled to dine at the event include Dennis Andersen, Gerald Baldasty, Eric Liu, Colleen McElroy, Linda Bierds, David Bosworth, William Calvin, Ivan Doig, Valerie Easton, Patricia Kuhl, Margaret Levi, Andrew Meltzoff, Ronald Moore, and David Shields.
Johnson, a novelist, short story writer, essayist and cartoonist, is a1998 MacArthur Fellow and was awarded the 1990 National Book Award for Middle Passage. His balance of philosophy and folklore has been praised since the publication of his first novel, Faith and the Good Thing in 1974. Johnson defines his controversial version of black literature in Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988) as “a fiction of increasing artistic and intellectual growth, one that enables us as a people, as a culture, to move from narrow complaint to broad celebration.”
Johnson’s titles include: Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories (Scribner, 2005), Turning the Wheel (1993), Middle Passage (1998, 1990), Dreamer: A Novel (Scribner, 1999), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations (1982).
University Book Store representatives will be at the event with authors’ books, which may be purchased and signed by the authors. Literary Voices is made possible with support from University Press and the UW College of Arts and Sciences. Proceeds from the dinner will support University Libraries preservation, undergraduate student scholarship awards, and collection enhancement.
Advance tickets are $100, and can be purchased by calling 206-616-8397 or e-mailing uwlibs@u.washington.edu For more information, visit the UW Libraries events Web site: http://lib.washington.edu/friends/.
